Analyst's Personality Research Articles

The intrapsychic and the intersubjective in contemporary psychoanalysis

This text discusses the evolution that has taken place since the beginning of psychoanalysis and that continues into contemporary practice. It focuses specifically on the causes and modalities of this evolution and its possible assessment in relation to the teachings of Freud. Addressed to a consulting patient, early psychoanalysis was constructed around successive discoveries in the research process, and the importance of the analyst's personality for the therapeutic process has been increasingly recognized. Due to the discovery of transference and countertransference, as well as the study of the analyst–analysand pair, current psychoanalytic practice can be described as intersubjective. Contemporary psychoanalysis entails no longer the study of a specific subject, but rather that of the relationship between the two participants and their joint work as a means to deduce and ultimately change the modalities of the analysand. This is a more and more common and widespread treatment model, although there are differences in terms of the conception of intersubjectivity. This paper cites analysts and groups of analysts involved in this subject, and the nuances of their approaches reflect differences in ideology. Baranger's “field theory,” for instance, is discussed in general terms. Its known origins and consequences for the practice of each member of the analytic pair are discussed, along with their common work and eventual changes.

Individual-Analyst Characteristics and Forecast Error

The purpose of the study reported here was to investigate how characteristics of analysts affect their forecast errors. Previous research has found positive serial correlation in forecast errors, which can be attributed to underreaction to new information, especially to bad news. The relationship between an analyst's behavior and that analyst's characteristics is not clear, however, because most previous work was based solely on consensus estimates. By using detailed historical data, I found a stronger serial correlation among the herd-to-consensus analysts (that is, the group with a small average distance between their forecasts and the consensus forecast) than among other analysts. Moreover, average distance to consensus itself has a positive serial correlation, and it may be attributed to an analyst's personality (optimistic or pessimistic). I found strong positive serial correlation in the average distance to consensus among the herd-to-consensus analysts. These results show that herd-to-consensus analysts submit earnings estimates that are not only close to the consensus but are also strongly affected by their personalities.

Journal reviews

Articles reviewed:Bernstein, Jeanne Wolff. ‘Countertransference: our new royal road to the unconscious?’, Psychoanalytic DialoguesCrastnopol, Margaret. ‘The analyst's personality: Winnicott analyzing Guntrip as a case in point’, Contemporary PsychoanalysisEpstein, L. ‘The analyst's “bad‐analyst” feelings: a counterpart to the process of resolving implosive defenses’, Contemporary PsychoanalysisGarwood, Alfred. ‘Psychic security: its origins, development and disruption‘, British Journal of PsychotherapyHaynes, Jane. ‘Facing the self: is man no more than this?’, HarvestPapadopoulos, Renos K. ‘Storied community as secure base: Response to the paper by Nancy Caro Hollander “Exile: Paradoxes of Loss and Creativity”’, British Journal of PsychotherapySand, Rosemary. ‘The interpretation of dreams: Freud and the Western tradition’ & Greenberg, Ramon & Pearlman, Chester. ‘The interpretation of dreams: a classic revisited’, Psychoanalytic DialoguesSpensley, Sheila. ‘Learning from Bion’, Journal of the British Association of PsychotherapistsWilgowicz, Perel. ‘Listening psychoanalytically to the Shoah half a century on’,International Journal of Psychoanalysis

Patient-therapist match: revelation or resistance?

Patient-therapist match is a relatively new yet frequently invoked concept within psychoanalysis. Despite Freud's appreciation of the influence of the analyst's past to his or her work within the analytic setting, psychoanalysts have historically held varied opinions about the degree to which the analyst's personality and conflicts affect the analytic process. As analysis was reconfigured as a two-person system, attention focused on the fit between patient and analyst. The literature on patient-therapist match is reviewed, and the conclusion reached that this intuitively appealing concept suffers from a lack of rigorous definition and operationalization. Many authors invoke match in ways that imply that it is real, static, external to the domain of analytic inquiry, and unaffected by analytic process. In its present form, the concept of patient-therapist match obstructs rather than facilitates analytic exploration and obscures rather than clarifies what happens between analyst and analysand in psychoanalysis. By suggesting that match exists as a reality outside the domain of transference and countertransference, analysts may overlook the importance of psychoanalytic technique in creating a sense of match. Analysts may attribute stalemated or limited analyses to a bad match, rather than tenaciously exploring the transference-countertransference configurations that remain at the heart of analytic work.

Active imagination and the analysis of film.

The emotions aroused by the pleasure-generating mechanisms of the cinema are usually benign because they refer to a virtual world. Experiencing affects aroused by fictions can resemble being drawn into a rehearsal for a possible, imagined future that just might (but more likely never will) occur in the individual's life in the real world. Movie-goers, no less than the readers of novels, actively engage with the symbols that film makers inscribe in the screen text. In so doing, they take a measure of control over elements of the fiction. Screened fiction has thus the potential to help the individual grow in self-awareness. Shifting its focus to the work of the film critic, the paper argues that, suitably adapted to the requirements of working with a pre-recorded film or tape, Jung's concept of the active imagination helps us to model, license, limit and endorse the subjective element in textual analysis. Because the method proposed makes it possible formally to recognize that the interpretation of fiction is inevitably integrated with the analyst's personality, interpretation is always a matter of a reader bringing a text into being rather than disinterring a pre-existing object.

Mutual Containment in the Analytic Situation

The patient's containment of the analyst's affect occurs in a broad range of situations that extend far beyond the more visible instances when the analyst is directly expressive of his or her own affects. This paper begins to explore how patients help analysts contain various kinds of affects within the analytic process, particularly more routine and less heroic types of containment. Although this containment is generally a far less prominent feature of analytic work than is the containment provided by the analyst for the patient, it is omnipresent. Routine elements of containment that the patient provides for the analyst involve working with the knowledge of the limits of the other—including the possibility that in a long-term treatment the patient will often get to know quite well some of the quotidian aspects of the analyst's personality and its relation to the patient's conflicts. Mutual aspects of containment are extremely important in the expression and titration of anger and disappointment, desire, hope, humor, and the negotiation of psychic possibility within the analytic dyad.

The Analyst's Personality

(1999). The Analyst's Personality. Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 271-300.

Incognito or not? the patient's subjective experience of the analyst's private life

This paper examines the meaning for the patient of the analyst's personal life and personality which are ostensibly banished from the consulting room. The therapist has a not‐always‐so‐secret “secret life”; that the patient is supposed to “not know”; about. Yet, more or less unconscious perceptions, impressions, and fantasies about extratherapeutic aspects of the analyst are omnipresent and significantly color the psychoanalytic enterprise. Moreover the analyst as a person generally plays a critical and underacknowledged role in the patient's experience of the endeavor. Constructing multiple overlapping images of the analyst and of the analytic relationship, the patient discovers himself or herself in the matrix of these relationships with various images of the analytic other. The analysand is motivated to make sense of the analyst as wholly as possible, the better to place into context the analyst's interventions. The patient's resulting view of the analyst's subjective experience acts as a lens that filters and subtly alters the meaning of the analyst's communications. I illustrate these points by relating my work with a patient whose dreams uncannily picked up on a (consciously) unknown aspect of my private life—my having a handicapped son. The treatment thereafter centered on the patient's identification with my child (as someone “disabled") and on the meaning of her having dreamt something so personal about her therapist.

The personality structure of the analyst and its influence on the course of treatment.

G ENERALLY, we are accustomed to excluding the analyst from consideration as an individual factor when making statements on analytic treatment and the course of such treatment. Usually, we act as if the analyst's personality and its structure were something not to be considered in therapeutic occurrences. We believe we can do this for two reasons: firstly, because the concept of the analyst as an objective mirror of the patient's transference processes and repetition compulsions is natural to us; and secondly, because we trust that the training analysis has freed the analyst so adequately from neurotic reactions and disturbing personal problems that his personality structure ceases to play any significant role. If we include in our consideration the personality of the analyst, we nevertheless consider only the c0untertransference aspect, a relatively late discovery in the development of psychoanalysis. One appreciates the importance of countertransference nowadays, but only under the aspect of a fancied "objectively correct" technique which will be disturbed by countertransference in the form of personal affect reactions of the analyst to the patient, to the analytic situation, and to the transference of the patient. One therefore restricts the significance of the analyst's personality structure to countertransference, to deviations from the proper, the so-to-speak ideal technique, and one then attempts to formulate technical rules for dealing with countertransference. In opposition to the above, I wish to show that beyond countertransference in the purely technical sense and beyond the solution of personal problems during the training analysis, everyone, even the most thoroughly analyzed analyst, exhibits personality peculiarities which cannot be analyzed away despite endless analyses. We possess a personality structure which is part of us, a "personal formula" and individual "Xfactor" whose denim would be the equivalent of suppression. Actually, this is self-evident. Due to its origin in scientific medicine, psychoanalysis nevertheless has always entertained the